What is Tautulli? Tautulli is a free, open-source companion application for Plex Media Server. It monitors your server in real-time, providing detailed statistics on who is accessing your digital assets, what devices they are using, and whether their media stream is buffering or transcoding.
If you have built the best Plex server and automated your data retrieval using Sonarr and Radarr, you likely share your server with remote users on your network.
While Plex has a basic dashboard to show you what is currently playing, it is incredibly limited. It does not save historical data, it does not tell you why a video file is buffering, and it does not give you deep insights into your users’ habits.
If you are a data hoarder, you probably love looking at graphs and statistics. This is exactly what Tautulli was built for. In this guide, we will explain what Tautulli is, its best features, and why it is a mandatory tool for any serious Plex administrator.
What Is Tautulli?
In short: Tautulli is the monitoring layer that shows you exactly how your Plex server is being used, day to day.
The Best Features of Tautulli
Tautulli (formerly known as PlexPy) runs silently in the background of your home NAS. It constantly talks to your Plex server via an API key, recording every single action that happens.
Here are the four reasons why power users love it:
1. Deep Viewing History
Plex does not remember what your remote users accessed last week. Tautulli records everything permanently. You can see exactly how many times a specific digital asset has been viewed, which user accesses the most media, and what time of day your server is the busiest.
2. Transcoding and Buffering Alerts
If a user complains that a high-resolution file is buffering, Tautulli tells you exactly why. The dashboard shows whether the video is “Direct Playing” (meaning it is playing flawlessly) or if it is “Transcoding” (meaning your server is struggling to convert the file). It even shows you if their internet connection is too slow to handle the massive dataset.
3. Custom Notifications
Tautulli has an incredibly powerful notification engine. You can set it up to send you a Discord message, a Telegram alert, or an email the exact second your server goes offline, or whenever a specific user starts accessing a file.
4. Automated Newsletters
This is the most popular feature of Tautulli. Because you are constantly retrieving new archival data via your Usenet newsreader, your users might not know what has been added. Tautulli can automatically generate a beautiful, HTML-formatted newsletter every Friday and email it to your users, showing them all the new digital assets recently added to the server.
Tautulli vs. Media Request Tools
Tautulli is often confused with the request-management apps that let your users ask for new movies and shows, but the two solve completely different problems.
- Media request tools are the “Front Door.” They are what your users log into to request new media files and digital archives.
- Tautulli is the “Security Camera.” It is the app you log into to see what your users are actually accessing and how your server is performing.
Both types of apps are useful, and a monitoring tool like Tautulli runs perfectly alongside whatever request tool you choose.
How to Install Tautulli
Like most automation software in the data hoarding community, Tautulli is completely free and open-source.
If you are running Windows or macOS, you can download a native installer from the official Tautulli website. However, the best way to install it is via Docker.
If you are running a custom server (see our Unraid vs TrueNAS guide) or a Raspberry Pi NAS, you simply spin up the Tautulli Docker container.
Once installed, you open the Tautulli web interface, log in with your Plex account, and it will automatically find your server and begin recording data immediately.